Twitch hands the controller to the Internet hivemind, and I can't stop watching.

Twitch Plays Pokémon: what happens when a big chunk of the Internet tries to play the same instance of the same game at the same time? Basically nothing.

Most gamers in my Twitter orbit have been spending their time with the Titanfall beta since invitations began going out late last week, but I’ve become entranced by a different kind of online multiplayer game. I’m talking, of course, about “Twitch Plays Pokémon,” and I haven’t seen anything like it in a decade-and-a-half of Pokémon playing.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Twitch Plays Pokémon is described as “a social experiment” by its creator, who is streaming an emulated version of Pokémon Red to Twitch.tv. Viewers type commands into the Twitch chat stream, and an IRC bot translates those commands into input the game can understand. Typing “up,” “down,” “left,” “right,” “a,” “b,” or “start” will lead to an onscreen action after 20 to 40 seconds, depending on how far your video lags behind the chat window. You can see just what this looks like in the below video, which is representative of basically any given minute-and-a-half of gameplay.

Twitch Plays Pokémon. Yup, that's pretty much all there is to it.

As you can see, with up to tens of thousands of people feeding commands into the game at any time, the results are a bit... chaotic. Poor Red behaves as though he has been lobotomized, wandering the streets and hallways of the Kanto region like he's seriously tripping balls. He gets stuck in corners. He walks in circles, compulsively checking his Pokédex and saving over and over again. Commands stream in from the chat channel faster than the game can possibly process them, making progress difficult-to-impossible even without the lag factor or the “help” of gleeful trolls. The result is something as mesmerizing as it is pointless.

Both a Reddit liveblog and a Google document exist to track Twitch's progress, such as it is. Yes, progress was actually possible, early on. Believe it or not, the Internet hivemind managed to catch a team of Pokémon and clear four of the eight gyms in the first four days of play. The game seems to have become a victim of its own success at this point though—Twitch has been stuck in or near the same room in Team Rocket's lair for the better part of a day now. With over 50,000 players issuing delayed commands, the herky-jerky forward motion that was possible over the weekend appeared to have ground to a halt as of early this morning.

Even if the Twitch community can clear this hurdle, it still has to perform some impossibly precise maneuvering to beat the game. Victory can only plausibly happen when enough players get so sick of being stuck that they quit, making coordination viable again. I'm sure that weeks or months from now gaming sites will be running short, disinterested stories about the thousand-or-so people who stuck around long enough to beat Twitch Plays Pokémon.

Enlarge/ The Twitch stream has spawned both in-jokes and fan art about the in-jokes.

In the meantime, I'm left to ponder the larger meaning of this not-quite-a-game. The closest gaming phenomenon I can think of is “Salty Bet,” another Twitch flash-in-the-pan from last summer. That “game” pits computer-controlled, poorly programmed versions of various fighting game and pop culture characters against each other in the generalized fighting game emulator M.U.G.E.N. While spectators don’t take an active role in the proceedings, they can bet fake currency on the randomized outcome of each fight. Twitch Plays Pokémon is a little more directly interactive, but it and Salty Bet are cut from the same cloth. Both combine spectator sports with participatory group play, and both are equally difficult to explain to people who don’t “get it” (in my experience it helps to be a little inebriated, extraordinarily tired, or both).

Also like Salty Bet, much of the appeal of Twitch Plays Pokémon is the fan community of sorts that has sprung up around it like a virtual shantytown, spewing countless memes and image macros until it's time to move on to the next faddish distraction. Many, many imitators have sprung up, whether they're playing other versions of Pokémon or other games entirely.

Why are these communal watch-and-play experiences so appealing to so many? Maybe it's the fleeting, collective joy from the spectators in chat when Red finally budges forward after hours of running headlong into walls. Maybe it was the bone-deep sadness we all felt when, four days and nine hours in, Twitch released its starter Pokémon—a level 34 Charmeleon, nickname ABBBBBBK(—into the wild, never to be seen again. Or maybe it's just the amusement of leaving the computer for five hours and coming back only to see that Twitch is stuck in the exact same spot in the exact same room, content to save its non-progress in an unending loop.

It could even be that Twitch Plays Pokémon is a bleak-but-perfect summary of the human condition—a group of people unified behind a common cause that struggles and fails to accomplish even the most basic tasks. We ostensibly want the same thing, yet we expend Herculean amounts of effort only to end up right back where we started—at best. And that's the case even without considering the people who are only out for themselves.

In any case, Twitch Plays Pokémon encapsulates the best and worst qualities of our user-driven, novelty-hungry age. Today's Internet has an extraordinary propensity for creating things that (1) grow quickly, virally, and organically through word of mouth, (2) provide hours of entertainment, and (3) waste days of peoples’ lives for no apparent purpose (see also: Flappy Bird).

Twitch Plays Pokémon is a value-free time sink and it's deeply, deeply stupid. I know that. But if you know how to stop watching, you're doing better than I am.

Update: Since this article was written early this morning, a new mechanic has been added to Twitch Plays Pokémon in an effort to curb the trolls (and get past the Team Rocket hideout Twitch has spent the last day in). Players can vote to put the stream into "anarchy" or "democracy" mode. Anarchy works as described above and is a big, beautiful mess of random player inputs. Democracy mode caches commands for a while and uses the most popular input to control Red. This new mechanic seems to be allowing molasses-slow progress to happen again, and it's probably the only way to make the game playable with this many people. I don't know, though, I think I liked it better before.

Promoted Comments

Oh oh OHHHH under Democracy mode they got through the maze and reached the trainer at the end. The slowness of battle agitated them and Anarchy took over so they could spam commands. But Democracy didn't recover quickly enough after the battle (even though people could see the end coming and started spamming Democracy) and they walked back into the maze.

I've been watching this off and on for a few days, starting when they were trying to get to Lt. Surge. It was mesmerizing when there were about 20,000 players. Sadly, as the player base has grown, so have the number of trolls. The democracy mode was a necessary adjustment, unfortunately.

While watching the game has been entertaining, watching the ad-hoc community, and especially the fan art creation, has been the real joy. I look forward to the inevitable wiki sites that will chornicle the entire thing.

While they are still in the rocket maze, democracy mode does appear to be working, as he just took the correct step several times in a row. However the face that you can now say left 6 or whatever is causing the people who want to correctly go left to dilute their votes across multiple step sizes and increase the time it takes to get a consensus vote. Edit: Actually it seems to be twenty seconds of accumulation per vote but it seemed more variable, probably just lag.

Also it's kind of cute that there has to be enough people shouting "democracy" or the anarchists win.

While they are still in the rocket maze, democracy mode does appear to be working, as he just took the correct step several times in a row. However the face that you can now say left 6 or whatever is causing the people who want to correctly go left to dilute their votes across multiple step sizes and increase the time it takes to get a consensus vote.

Also it's kind of cute that there has to be enough people shouting "democracy" or the anarchists win.

That's how democracy actually works, right? :-)

It seems like the lag factor is still getting in the way, but maybe they'll clear the Team Rocket maze sometime today at least.

I was watching this for about half an hour last night and I agree that the democracy mode was necessary. In the particular spot they were stuck in, the trolls combined with the 20-40 second delay were just absolutely grinding any progress to a halt. They were basically going in circles on conveyor belts because pretty much all but one choice in that area loops you back around to starting all over again. The "monkeys typing on a keyboard approach" works to an extent when there's at least some room for error, but when nearly every step can put you back to start, the chance of ever getting out of that room drops to near zero.

Oh oh OHHHH under Democracy mode they got through the maze and reached the trainer at the end. The slowness of battle agitated them and Anarchy took over so they could spam commands. But Democracy didn't recover quickly enough after the battle (even though people could see the end coming and started spamming Democracy) and they walked back into the maze.

Extremely worthy art project, but horribad for streams on Twitch that weren't TPP; worse than the usual Big Esports Event chug. Chat was hosed for the better part of the weekend to the point that some streams deployed their own backup IRCs.

I took another look at it because of the democracy mode but the lag still makes it a frustrating mess. If there was some way to only accept input commands after everybody can see the result of the last input maybe they could actually get something done again with democracy mode but doing something as simple as leaving a room is extremely difficult still

Is it correct to assume that all those who shout anarchy there don't want to see any progress in the game?

No, not necessarily. In minor battles it's a lot faster and probably just as effective to spam rather than strategize, and in open, nonintricate areas it might be faster to Drunk Walk across than to try to get everyone to coordinate on such precise, fiddly instructions as "left 7, down 2, left 6" (as opposed to "left (twenty seconds), left (twenty seconds), left (twenty seconds)...")

But the people spamming it *while* in the maze? They delight in our misery.

I took another look at it because of the democracy mode but the lag still makes it a frustrating mess. If there was some way to only accept input commands after everybody can see the result of the last input maybe they could actually get something done again with democracy mode but doing something as simple as leaving a room is extremely difficult still

I think it actually works pretty much the same as real world democracy. It takes long time for democracy to make decisions. Just think how long it takes to for example change a president if the current one is not up to new challenges anymore. And in real democracy, same as in this game, many people don't have up to date information about the current state of affairs, so they vote based on some obsolete (ie lag) information they have.

I took another look at it because of the democracy mode but the lag still makes it a frustrating mess. If there was some way to only accept input commands after everybody can see the result of the last input maybe they could actually get something done again with democracy mode but doing something as simple as leaving a room is extremely difficult still

This comes up a lot, but it would kill what makes this so entertaining. I watched a copycat stream with only 25 people, which is small enough that you have a relatively high amount of control. It was completely dull in comparison to the chaos of the original TPP stream. This is entertaining precisely because it is so chaotic and difficult to control.

Is it correct to assume that all those who shout anarchy there don't want to see any progress in the game?

No, not necessarily. In minor battles it's a lot faster and probably just as effective to spam rather than strategize, and in open, nonintricate areas it might be faster to Drunk Walk across than to try to get everyone to coordinate on such precise, fiddly instructions as "left 7, down 2, left 6" (as opposed to "left (twenty seconds), left (twenty seconds), left (twenty seconds)...")

But the people spamming it *while* in the maze? They delight in our misery.

I took a look at it just now, and it seems people just say left or right without any numbers. I would say it works pretty well. The main character moves very slowly, but accurately.

To be fair, as a social experiment, the way anarchy mode is executed is flawed.

A similar experiment done by Loren Carpenter in 1991 was a lot better. The way it worked, was with a paddle, in which the input of every participator affected the paddle in Pong. One side was for up, the other for down. The speed and direction at which the paddles moved was decided by recording each side of crowd, and more importantly: utterly uncoordinated.

The Twitch experiment isn't even synchronized with the game: The way the original game works, is by polling for a command every x-amount of time. From the looks of it, it does so at about 4 or 5 frames per second. But the way the game interacts with the stream, is to take whichever command is on top of the stack generated by the comment stream - which is fine when it is being played by one or a few people, but not when a large group of people generate several commands between frames.

The result is that it takes a random command, or rather it takes whichever comment happens to overlap with the moment the game polls for a command.

The program could as easily take all the comments made during a frame, take an average and then clear the stack. But it doesn't. Thus anarchy mode is needlessly random, and worse! It effectively ignores most of the comments made when there are a lot of players. This makes it worthless as a social experiment and biased towards trolling efforts. But from a gaming perspective it's very funny this way.

I took another look at it because of the democracy mode but the lag still makes it a frustrating mess. If there was some way to only accept input commands after everybody can see the result of the last input maybe they could actually get something done again with democracy mode but doing something as simple as leaving a room is extremely difficult still

I think it actually works pretty much the same as real world democracy. It takes long time for democracy to make decisions. Just think how long it takes to for example change a president if the current one is not up to new challenges anymore. And in real democracy, same as in this game, many people don't have up to date information about the current state of affairs, so they vote based on some obsolete (ie lag) information they have.

very well said, great comparison. I wonder if this will someday become a study point in a college course?

To be fair, as a social experiment, the way anarchy mode is executed is flawed. [...]

It could as easily take all the comments made during a frame, take an average and then clear the stack. But it doesn't. Anarchy mode is needlessly random, and worse it effectively ignores most of the commands issued. In my opinion, this makes worthless as a social experiment because it's biased towards trolling efforts. But from a gaming perspective it's very funny this way.

aka Democracy Mode...? The only difference is a "frame" lasts a long time in Democracy to compensate for stream lag. This facilitates people consistently overshooting by only one or two steps instead of seven or eight.

It is completely unavoidable that in a process-every-button-press mode that a huge player count would *vastly* overwhelm the turn-based 8-bit game's ability to process them. The result isn't random in terms of button presses but a random *sampling* of who gets to participate, which means that progress can only be made if a very large portion of the anarchists are in fact inputting the right thing, which I think is rather the point. That said, I'm on Team Democracy, at least when it comes to very large numbers of players. It ensures that every player's input is counted every turn, and any player who's playing "for real" as opposed to trolling will have their input in the winning slot frequently enough to feel like they, personally, are helping.

To be fair, as a social experiment, the way anarchy mode is executed is flawed. [...]

It could as easily take all the comments made during a frame, take an average and then clear the stack. But it doesn't. Anarchy mode is needlessly random, and worse it effectively ignores most of the commands issued. In my opinion, this makes worthless as a social experiment because it's biased towards trolling efforts. But from a gaming perspective it's very funny this way.

aka Democracy Mode...? The only difference is a "frame" lasts a long time in Democracy to compensate for stream lag. This facilitates people consistently overshooting by only one or two steps instead of seven or eight.

It is completely unavoidable that in a process-every-button-press mode that a huge player count would *vastly* overwhelm the turn-based 8-bit game's ability to process them. The result isn't random in terms of button presses but a random *sampling* of who gets to participate, which means that progress can only be made if a very large portion of the anarchists are in fact inputting the right thing, which I think is rather the point. That said, I'm on Team Democracy, at least when it comes to very large numbers of players. It ensures that every player's input is counted every turn, and any player who's playing "for real" as opposed to trolling will have their input in the winning slot frequently enough to feel like they, personally, are helping.

There is no sampling. It's a game of chance which removes all influence and randomly assigns control to a single commentator/dictator for the duration of a single frame. That's not anarchy, that's chaos.

Way way way wait...so you're telling me that when I hear someone say, perhaps at a music festival, they are "tripping balls", they are referencing (probably unknowingly?) [what started as] an inside Pokemon joke?!

So what I got from all this is if we try and have libertarianism where everyone can do whatever it is they want then nothing gets done, we move backwards, and takes way longer than if we had a structured system in place.

So what I got from all this is if we try and have libertarianism where everyone can do whatever it is they want then nothing gets done, we move backwards, and takes way longer than if we had a structured system in place.

They accomplished things without the democracy mode set into place. The problem is that as the population grows, it takes longer because of the increased amount of mixed signals.

With democracy, there could still be a lot of nothing or backwards movement. It just takes a majority of the people to sign onto it, at which point you have a system that "works," but only does so for the majority. The minority at that point are largely irrelevant.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.